Design - Part 2 - Logos

We all read about General Motor’s declining market share. I got curious about how statistics that influence Wall Street stock traders translated into the real world. After all, if a large part of the market is rental companies and the well-to-do who trade cars every year, then the market may represent only a fraction of the vehicles on the road.

I started counting the number of cars that passed me in traffic that were made by GM, Ford or Chrysler. What surprised me was not the results, about evenly divided between the Big Three and the others, but the difficulty of determining who made which vehicle.

I confess I’ve never been much interested in what cars look like, and could never play children’s identification games. I could easily be the prototype for those playful stories written about what a Martian or 22nd century archaeologist would think.

Still, when I started to look, I was struck by how true it is that most cars look alike, that many station wagons (SUVs) look alike, that most pickup trucks look alike, even how similar are sports cars. Only VW’s and Jeeps are still recognizable, and only some of those.

I turned to reading the car name or logo, and discovered another problem. Most names on cars assume the watcher already knows who makes what, is an informed consumer. The logos are hard to find, and most are interchangeable. It took several days to determine some weren’t fancy hood latches, and longer to learn which logos and models went with which manufacturers.

Ford’s blue oval is the most recognizable: the colored shape is instantly recognizable and it’s usually placed on the right side by the rear taillight where a driver is most likely to be looking in traffic. Most of the others are chrome designs in hollow circles under the center brake lights. One doesn’t have time in traffic to distinguish internals of common shapes when detail blurs at more than a car length.

Apparently everyone is selling understated elegance. Only older cars and trucks have names that are large enough to read at any safe driving distance. The logos for both Chevrolet and Ford have been shrunk. The one for Oldsmobile has been so modernized, I had to decode it to connect it with its maker.

After a while, I started speculating on how many logos were really the same. If I turned the Oldsmobile rocket slightly, I had an Accura; if I turned it some more I had a Lexus. How does one tell the Oldsmobile logo from the ruptured duck of Lake Central air lines, what would a Rorschach test make of it? This is not the kind of speculation designers should be inviting in traffic.

At the time I was pondering the failure of automotive designers to create unique, identifiable vehicles, GM was selling its mortgage finance division, GMAC. The photographs I saw of the executives showed them wearing identical grey suits and yellow or red ties. Similar photographs of Ford executives announcing plant closings in January of this year, 2006, showed them in similar grey suits, with nondescript ties.

The only difference between the executives: GM grey was more bluish, Ford grey more brown. The GM ties stood out more than the Ford ones, but, by calling attention to themselves, exaggerated the impression they were somehow not right.

The message they delivered, like the logos, was not the one intended. They were supposed to personify power and elegance, a united management team. They didn’t want to show the diversity that appears in work place meetings, where some wear suits, some sport coats. Most wear white shirts, some wear blue. The majority wear ties, some bolos. Jerry York appears in a turtleneck.

Instead, they were like the automobiles and logos they market. They demonstrated they could not show distinguishing individual traits within the range of what was defined as acceptable.

One could go a step farther, and note that the men in the GM photograph had similar builds, similar hairstyles, were of the same general age. At Ford, three of the men on stage had similar characteristics, and were little different than the GM executives. Indeed, there’s nothing that distinguishes Bill Ford from Rick Wagoner to the uninitiated.

Ford had five men on stage, and the other two were physically different. The finance man, Don Leclair, was silver haired and slightly built. Jim Padilla, Ford’s president, was a big man who dwarfed those around him. His bones were big, his shoulders were wide, his skull was large. He’s the only one who came up through the plant floor, and the only one whose body language in a New York Times photograph signaled his disapproval of what he was hearing.

Padilla’s the first to be removed. David Cole tells us, he "helped management reconnect with Ford’s people in the plants and with Ford’s dealers after the chaos of early 2001." Now that the company is closing the plants he salvaged, the company needs someone who will "not get consumed himself in what will be a very difficult process."

Bill Ford is going to use a committee, not someone described as a "fiery" engineer from a Detroit Mexican-Irish family.

Automobiles are about style and performance. Logos and demeanor in public forums distill style into potent symbols. These suggest companies haunted by Henry Ford’s antisemitism and William Durant’s flamboyance, the failure of Edsel and GM models not remembered, companies who’ve spent too many years defining themselves as what they are not.

Now it’s time to define who they are, and they fear strong individuals, who are the only ones who’ve ever made a difference. Instead, they bury themselves in consensus. No doubt public relations advisors submit logos to focus groups to identify anything that might put off some customer. Likewise, experts no doubt suggest how men should dress, based on research like that of James Molloy on how people respond to clothing.

Committees may avoid failure, conformity may reassure Wall Street; they don’t guarantee success and they obviously don’t sell cars.

Sources:
Cole, David. Quoted by Tom Walsh, "Ford president Jim Padilla to retire," Detroit Free Press,
6 April 2006.

Ford plant closing photographs, Fabrizio Costantini, The New York Times, 24 January 2006, and The Detroit News, 24 January 2006.

GMAC sale photograph, Rebecca Cook, Reuters, The Detroit News, 3 April 2006.

Molloy, John T. Dress for Success, 1975.

York, Jerry. Photograph, Jeff Kowalski, Bloomberg News, The New York Times, 29 March 2006.